There’s been a bit of a move back towards shorter articles, with journals spinning up new series just for short pieces. 

I attribute it to the sheer quantity of tests and checks we feel are necessary, before the reviewers ever express concerns. The analogue is something like new regulations needing to reference existing regulations, which are growing in quantity. 

Undisciplined

charts_and_numbers

The growth of western bureaucracy

Scoresby

There's an interesting in phenomenon in academia---for economics definitely, and likely for other fields---where the length and quantity of papers has grown substantially to the point that no one really reads them carefully anymore, except maybe just the referees and editors (if that).  

It's usually blamed on the ease of word processing and statistical programming technology. It's just way easier to spam more stuff into the text than before.

I wonder if the same is going on with respect to legislation.

Producing words has become cheaper than reading and interpreting them.  We need some sort of mechanism to bring the two back into balance.

@Undisciplined
